SUMMARY: Author Nicco Mele's new book, 'The End of Big,' explores how technology has made the world a smaller place, opening up new opportunities for local politics, small business and average citizens to wield influence. Political editor Christina Bellantoni talks to Mele about his work and the ways technology impacts our democracy.
SUMMARY: Jeffrey Brown talks with the Daily Download's Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn about the disconnect between President Obama's Twitter support and public opinion poll data. They also look at the president's efforts to push his administration's policies on immigration and gun control on social media.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): During the campaign, it was called Obama for America, President Obama's online effort to galvanize support. In his second term, it's morphed into Organizing for Action, again reaching out for support, this time on particular issues and again using social media.
This week, the president addresses the group for the first time.
And I talked to our Daily Download team, Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz, about it and more when we sat down together yesterday.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): .....to our series about the digital world's cultural impact.
NewsHour political editor Christina Bellantoni is here with the Daily Download team.
CHRISTINA BELLANTONI (Newshour): Ordinary citizens have more opportunities to talk directly to the president these days.
Joining us to discuss how the White House is using the Internet to work around the press are two journalists from the website Daily Download. Lauren Ashburn is the site's editor in chief. Howard Kurtz is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources."
While most Americans were winding up their holiday weekends last Monday, the phones at the Vancouver headquarters of HootSuite, a social media management company, began to ring.
Burger King’s Twitter account had just been hacked. The company’s logo had been replaced by a McDonald’s logo, and rogue announcements began to appear. One was that Burger King had been sold to a competitor; other posts were unprintable.
“Every time this happens, our sales phone lines light up,” said Ryan Holmes, the chief executive of HootSuite, which provides management and security tools for Twitter accounts, including the ability to prevent someone from gaining access to an account. “For big brands, this is a huge liability,” he said, referring to the potential for being hacked.
What happened to Burger King — and, a day later, to Jeep — is every brand manager’s nightmare. While many social media platforms began as a way for ordinary users to share vacation photos and status updates, they have now evolved into major advertising vehicles for brands, which can set up accounts free but have to pay for more sophisticated advertising products.
Burger King and Jeep, owned by Chrysler, are not alone. Other prominent accounts have fallen victim to hacking, including those for NBC News, USA Today, Donald J. Trump, the Westboro Baptist Church and even the “hacktivist” group Anonymous.
Those episodes raised questions about the security of social media passwords and the ease of gaining access to brand-name accounts. Logging on to Twitter is the same process for a company as for a consumer, requiring just a user name and one password.
Twitter, like Facebook, has steadily introduced a number of paid advertising options, raising the stakes for advertisers. Brands that pay to advertise on Twitter are assigned a sales representative to help them manage their accounts, but they are not given any more layers of security than those for a typical user.
Ian Schafer, the founder and chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital advertising company that also fielded a few phone calls from clients concerned about the Burger King attack, argued that Twitter bore some responsibility.
“I think Twitter needs to step up its game in providing better security,” Mr. Schafer said. In a memo to his staff about such attacks, he called on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest “and anyone else serious about having brands on their platform” to “invest time in better understanding how brands operate day to day.”
“It’s also time for these platforms to use their influence to shape security standards on the Web,” he wrote.
The risk for Twitter is in offending potential business partners as the company tries to build its advertising dollars, which make up the bulk of its revenue. In 2012, the company grew more than 100 percent, earning $288.3 million in global advertising revenue, according to eMarketer.
On Wednesday, it introduced a product that would allow advertisers to create and manage ads through third parties like HootSuite, Adobe and Salesforce.com. Advertising is estimated to account for more than 90 percent of the company’s revenue.
“This is not something we take lightly,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, in an interview last month. (The company declined to comment on the Burger King hacking, saying it did not discuss specific accounts.) Mr. Prosser said Twitter had manual and automatic controls in place to identify malicious content and fake accounts, but acknowledged that the practice was more art than science.
Mr. Prosser said Twitter had taken an active role in combating the biggest sources of malicious content.
Last year, the company sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the site. “With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” it said in a statement. “We hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”
But security experts say, and the recent hacks of Burger King, Jeep and other brands have demonstrated, that Twitter could do more.
“Twitter and other social media accounts are like catnip for script kiddies, hacktivists and serious cybercriminals alike,” said Mark Risher, chief executive at Impermium, a Silicon Valley start-up that aims to clean up social networks. “Because of their deliberately easy access and liberal content policies, accounts on these networks prove irresistibly tempting.”
SUMMARY: A third of adult viewers under 40 who watched the second presidential debate were "double screening," meaning they both watched the debate and used an additional form of digital media. Ray Suarez talks to the Daily Download's Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz about the "binders full of women" meme and politicized search terms.
Facial recognition tech makes it easier to combine offline, online identities
Imagine walking down a street and having a total stranger being able to instantly pull up your name, date of birth, Social Security number, your last blog item and other data on their smart phone.
That could soon happen, said Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College.
In a presentation at the Black Hat conference here this week, Acquisti demonstrated how it's becoming easier for strangers to identify people and infer detailed information about them from their publicly available images on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
The trend has "ominous implications for privacy," Acquisti said. "I'm here to raise awareness of what I feel is going to happen."
Acquisti detailed the results of a series of experiments he conducted in which he applied off-the-shelf facial recognition tools to publicly available Facebook profile images to uniquely identify individuals. In one of the experiments, Acquisti and his team of researchers attempted to glean the true identities of individuals who had posted their images under assumed names on an online dating site
First, they used a search engine and an API they developed to automatically extract about 275,000 publicly available profile images of Facebook members in a particular city.
They then did the same with publicly available images of individuals in the same city who had posted on the dating site. Acquisti used a facial recognition tool called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) developed at CMU to see whether he could find matches between the dating site images and the Facebook profile pictures.
In all, about 5,800 dating site members also had Facebook profiles. Of these, more than 4,900 were uniquely identified. The numbers are significant because a previous CMU survey showed that about 90% of Facebook members use their real name on their profiles, Acquisiti said. Though the dating site members had used assumed names to remain anonymous, their real identities were revealed just by matching them with their Facebook profiles.
In another experiment, Acquisti's team took webcam photos of nearly 100 students and tried to match those images with the pictures on each student's Facebook profile.
Students were asked to pose for three photos and then fill out a short survey. While the surveys were being filled out, the webcam images were run against PittPatt to see whether a match could be found on Facebook.
In that experiment, about 31% of the students were correctly matched with their Facebook profiles -- in about 3 seconds.
